Iggy's Has Outlasted Its Competitors

Iggy's has the strange problem of having helped invent the competition that is now trying to bury it.

The restaurant opened in 2004, in a smaller earlier form at The Regent, and moved in 2010 to its current Orchard Road hotel location, which has since rebranded from Hilton to voco Orchard Singapore. The category it operated in then was different from the category it operates in now. The kind of modern European cooking that Iggy's helped establish in Singapore, refined, French-leaning, technique-heavy, ingredient-focused, was, in the mid-2000s, less crowded than it has since become. The newer modern European restaurants that have appeared in the city in the last decade have, in many ways, built on the kind of foundation Iggy's laid.

That foundational position is both the restaurant's structural advantage and its structural problem.

The advantage is the operational discipline that only comes from running the same kind of kitchen for many years. The staff have been trained in the house style, the supplier relationships have deepened, the wine programme has accumulated, and the customer base has formed around the room over a long stretch.

The problem is that the category is now crowded with newer restaurants that have, in some cases, learned from Iggy's and improved on it. The restaurant has to keep being itself against a competitive landscape that did not exist when it opened. That tension is its daily working pressure.

The room

The restaurant sits on Level 3 of voco Orchard Singapore (the former Hilton Singapore Orchard, the same building rebranded), at 581 Orchard Road. Thirty-two seats, including an eight-seat dessert bar added at the voco location. The setting is, in some sense, working against the restaurant. A hotel-housed fine-dining room has to argue for its identity against the broader hotel context: the elevators, the corridors, the conference traffic, the casual tourist movement.

The interior is calibrated to overcome this. The dining room is dark, intimate, calmly lit, with a long counter facing the open kitchen and a smaller number of tables behind. The seating is generously spaced. The lighting is the kind of soft warm light that flatters food and faces. The pace of the meal is unhurried.

The counter is where most diners sit if they care about the food. The kitchen is visible, and the cooking is the room's centre. Founder and Restaurateur-Sommelier Ignatius "Iggy" Chan, one of the four 1994 co-founders of Les Amis before leaving in the early 2000s to start his own room, is regularly on the floor. He describes himself as a sommelier rather than a chef, which matters for how Iggy's is run. Head Chef Jake Lee, from Perak, Malaysia, joined as Chef de Partie in 2017 and was appointed Head Chef in July 2019. The cooking philosophy is contemporary European technique applied to top-tier produce, heavily Japan-sourced with French ingredients alongside, grounded in a Singaporean sense of place.

That format is the right one for the restaurant's age and identity. A more modern open-floor layout would have broken the room's intimacy. A more traditional back-of-house kitchen would have removed the counter's connection between the diner and the cooking. The current configuration sits in the right middle.

The opening sequence

The tasting menu opens with a sequence of small composed bites that establish the kitchen's working vocabulary. The bites are recognisably modern European in their grammar: French technique, European ingredient base, the kind of plating the category has settled into over the years.

The opening is not radical. The kitchen is not trying to surprise the diner with novelty. It is the restaurant's quiet way of demonstrating that the kitchen has been cooking this kind of food for a long time and has refined the small components, the sauces, the textures, the seasoning, to the level long-running kitchens can produce.

That refinement is the restaurant's main argument. The dishes are not the most innovative in the city. They are, in many cases, the most carefully constructed versions of standard modern European preparations the city has on offer.

The scallop course

The scallop course was the kitchen's clearest argument on the night.

The plate arrived as a small composition: two seared scallops on a bed of cauliflower puree, with a small drizzle of brown butter and a few microgreens. The plating was restrained, pale tones, deliberate space between components, the kind of careful arrangement the format prefers.

The scallops had been seared on the diver-style: large, plump, properly fresh, with the sear visible across the top surface and the inside still translucent in the centre. The cauliflower puree had been pushed through a fine sieve until it had the kind of silken texture that distinguishes a serious puree from a casual mash. The brown butter had been clarified and seasoned, with the slightly nutty character that proper brown butter develops.

The first bite combined the scallop, a small amount of puree, and a few drops of the brown butter. The components cohered. The scallop's natural sweetness was lifted by the nutty butter, the cauliflower puree provided the textural counterpoint, and the microgreens added a faint herbal note that brightened the bite.

This is what a properly composed modern European scallop course should do. The protein is the centre, the supporting components are calibrated, the plating is restrained, and the flavours layer without competing.

By the second bite the components had stopped registering separately.

The course is not, in 2024, a dish that would surprise anyone. The seared-scallop-with-cauliflower combination has been on modern European menus for years. The reason it works at Iggy's is not novelty. It is execution: scallops properly fresh, puree properly built, brown butter properly clarified, plating properly restrained, every component refined to the level the kitchen has refined it over years.

That refinement is the restaurant's competitive advantage. Newer restaurants may have more interesting concepts. What Iggy's offers is the standard preparation, done well over years.

The wine programme

The wine list at Iggy's is one of the deeper lists in the city, roughly twenty-five thousand bottles in the cellar, Burgundy-heavy, which is the structural signature of a Restaurateur-Sommelier rather than a chef-owner. The depth runs across European producers, with strong Burgundy, Bordeaux, Champagne and Italian sections, and the kind of by-the-glass programme that lets the diner navigate the list without committing to bottles.

The sommelier service is competent. The pairings across the tasting menu are considered. The wines are calibrated to the dishes rather than chosen for prestige.

The list has accumulated over the years. The cellar has grown. The producers represented are deeper than they were ten years ago. That accumulation is, in some sense, the restaurant's most underappreciated asset, and it is part of what the diner is paying for.

The friction

The friction with Iggy's is the friction of being a long-running restaurant in a category that has crowded with newer competitors. Some diners will find the kitchen's cooking less exciting than what newer restaurants are doing. The category has moved. Iggy's has moved with it, but slowly. The restaurant has not chased every new trend.

That conservatism is the restaurant's deliberate position. It has chosen to be a refined long-running version of the category rather than an experimental one. The choice is defensible, and the choice has limits.

The other friction is the hotel setting. The voco Orchard context is, structurally, working against the restaurant's argument. A diner who would happily eat at a standalone version of the same restaurant may feel less excited about taking the elevator to a hotel floor for the same dinner. The restaurant has, mostly, overcome this through the quality of the room's interior and the cooking. But the friction is real.

The pricing is on the higher side of Singapore fine dining, reflecting the room's overhead, the wine programme, and the sourcing. Whether the pricing justifies itself is a personal judgement.

What the restaurant is for

Iggy's is one of the few fine-dining restaurants in Singapore that has held its category position for nearly two decades. The kitchen has not collapsed. The wine programme has accumulated. The room has been refreshed without losing its identity. The staff have been trained in the house style across generations of cooks.

The scallop course, the opening sequence and the wine programme all carry the same evidence. A modern European fine-dining restaurant that has held its standard for over twenty years is rare. Iggy's has done it, and you can taste it in the cooking. The seared scallops on cauliflower puree with brown butter, eaten at a counter facing the open kitchen on a slow weekday evening, were the evidence, a single composition by a kitchen that has been doing this kind of work for long enough to make the work look easy.

Its continuing existence, in a category that has produced and lost many competitors over the same period, is the rest of the argument.